Some of Arturo’s work has shown that when a good player goes from a bad team to a good team they get a little worse. There are exceptions like the 2008 Boston Celtics, which combined a great set of complimentary talents to make one of the greatest teams ever. And that actually brings me to today’s subject. What if the very idea of how lineups are constructed is wrong?

A team tends to put out their best players and then sub out very inferior players off the bench. A question I had is why is playing a player like Dwyane Wade off the bench a bad idea? If you ensure that both LeBron and Dwyane Wade play 36-40 minutes a game then why does it matter if one of them is on the bench when the initial tipoff occurs?

I did a fun test. The Thunder lost soundly to the Heat in last year’s finals. Except, it was more like the recent presidential race. The Thunder didn’t get blown out repeatedly. Rather, they had a collection of close losses sink them.

I grabbed the data from Popcorn Machine for how the game went. I then took the players stats from the regular season from the NBA Geek. Then I looked at what the production for each lineup the Thunder put out. Finally I graphed this to show the strength of each lineup the Thunder put out (based on their regular season numbers)

Strength of OKC Thunder Lineups as Game 3 went on.

As we can see the Thunder started with their strongest players. Then their reserves came in. To start the second half, the Thunder put out another strong collection. Then to end the third they put in some very weak reserves. They put back in some stronger players towards the end of the game. Let’s compare this to the actual game flow (chart from Popcorn Machine).

When the line goes up the Thunder were winning. When the line goes down, the Heat were winning. Now this chart doesn’t line up identically with the strength of the lineups the Thunder put out. I’d be surprised if it did. What we can see if that when the Thunder put out their strong lineup in period three they grabbed their biggest lead. Then they replaced these players with their weakest lineup of the game (Derek Fisher, Daequan Cook, James Harden, Thabo Sefolosha, Kendrick Perkins) and in a very short period of time the game was turned around. It seems like the Thunder were trying to go “small ball” but really they were putting in a weak collection of players.

So, my end question is should teams be aiming to play their best together? Rather than have more peaks and valleys maybe they should instead be more consistent across the game? To be fair, the Thunder had problems by giving players like Fisher and Perkins major minutes. It may be that playing Harden off the bench wasn’t actually a bad idea. Maybe, they should have tried to make sure that every lineup they put out was strong. By putting out players like Fisher, Cook and Perkins together, the Thunder left themselves vulnerable. I’ll have to look at more teams. A single game does not prove a theory. But the idea of if teams should space out there stars just doesn’t seem that crazy to me.

7 Responses to "Should Your Star Come off the Bench?"

Dre,
I’m certain this makes too much sense. I suspect, though, that most ‘stars,’ even if told they will get the most minutes per game AND always be on the floor in crunch time, will be highly resistant to the idea (translation: Kobe/Melo/D12 at their morale-destroying worst). Granted, GM’s/coaches could use this post to convince players or justify their decisions; good thing for players that front offices don’t listen to any statistical evidence that isn’t in-house, right?

To a first order approximation, we shouldn’t care. Does it matter if you get +20 point margin the first 10 minutes but -10 the next, or +5 / +5 consistently? No, it doesn’t, you win just as many games either way. What you’re looking for, as mentioned, are things like diminishing or increasing returns in your lineup or matchups; maybe you get diminishing returns on putting all your best players out at once; maybe you get diminishing returns from having your starters beat up scrubs.

I suspect this is the sort of question that’s going to be impossible to answer without a ton of data. Say, several years of lineup level plus/minus, along with the box stats to regress onto point margin. You’ll need the box stats to tighten the margins on your expectations so you can normalize and aggregate them for your plus/minus data; without it you can’t build the huge sample size you’ll need to deal with the inherent noise in plus/minus.

Is that the right predicting variable, though? If one wants to predict the change in the score, then wouldn’t the *delta* of the total WP (I.e., the total Thunder WP minus total Heat WP) make more sense?

More generally, I wonder whether one could estimate a function (well, an interesting one) mapping the delta total WP to delta score. That might provide an interesting answer to the title question:
* if the function is accelerating (e.g., deltaWP^2), then stars should play together.
* if it is decelerating (e.g., sqrt(deltaWP)), then stars should be spread out.
* and if it is linear, then it doesn’t matter when stars play, just *that* they play.

Speculating even more, if the function turned out to be pretty noisy, then this might provide a way to start to understand when/how team performance could be more than just the sum of the WP numbers.

My guess is that diminishing returns should be a factor. The way I see it, the goal is to create a balance of scoring, rebounding, defense, play making etc… If you use two players that create most of their value the same way, there will be greater diminishing returns than if you use two that create it differently.

For example, when Amare was healthy (leave aside the fact that he’s been hurt), he created most of his value by being an efficient scorer.

You have to ask yourself if it ever made sense to combine him with a guy like Melo who is a high volume shooter with similar weaknesses. It almost had to decrease the value of Amares scoring because his usage would decline. It’s kind of like 1 + 1 = 1.75.

A better combination might have been a SF that generated equal value to Melo as a rebounder, defender, & play maker.

This is why many Knicks fans want Amare to come off the bench when he comes back. He can be the #1 scoring option of the 2nd unit and if combined with Brewer (a terrific defender) and a PG like Kidd that can get him the ball, the net will be a better result.

For a team like the Lakers this kind of idea could give massive dividends, given the differential between their stars productivity and the bench. Kobe likes the ball, so why handicap Nash by having them play the majority of their time together. Each of them can be effective regardless of the talent around them (offensively at least). If you built one unit around Kobe + Gasol + Meta and the other around Nash + Howard you will always have a lethal floor presence. Then they will not be as vulnerable by the weaknesses of their bench.

That said I like watching the Lakers lose, so I hope they don’t do this-they are just the most obvious example to use.

OKC wise I think they would be better served with Durant and Westbrook playing fewer minutes together-though mainly because this would result in Durant seeing more of the ball.

This argument makes a lot of sense for advocating for more balanced lineups in general, but in any case of not starting the game you reduce the number of minutes available for your stars to play/recover. So unless you are intentionally limiting stars mintues below their stamina (popovich) this strategy is likely to hurt the team quality despite any diminishing returns effect.